HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Scipio_Afri

473 karma · joined March 17, 2017

submissionscomments
Scipio_Afri··on Nearly 200 people under observation after Irkutsk lab worker dies from plague
I think perhaps there is a correlation with population density as well. Wuhan is fairly dense, and the wet market that is subject to speculation is located in the most densely populated district of wuhan.

Is it possible that the animals at the wet market itself was the source? Sure. But it seems sort of coincidental to me it is also the most dense area of the city; could’ve already been spreading and this location just happened to be where a major outbreak occurred from density factors alone.

Scipio_Afri··on The 30-Hour Shift That Turned a San Jose Robot Lab into a Global Spectacle
"it operates under a different paradigm"

And what paradigm is that which you decided to leave out ?

Scipio_Afri··on NPM Website Is Down
Easy there buddy, not everything needs to be a polymarket bet :-)
Scipio_Afri··on DeepSeek v4
Thank you for this due diligence, I was just reading through the technical report and couldn’t find any references to the software stack or hardware mentioning Huawei either and came back here wondering about this comment that I had read earlier.
Scipio_Afri··on Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition
What a find! It's on page 106 but I didn't immediately do a control-f to find it or look at the table of contents. My gosh, all the stuff I flipped through before that... some things haven't changed (e.g. Digikey and National Instruments ads).
Scipio_Afri··on Hungary's Viktor Orbán Concedes Defeat in Election
Why is this and all other posts about this flagged?
Scipio_Afri··on Viktor Orbán concedes defeat after 'painful' election result
Why is this and all other posts about this flagged?
Scipio_Afri··on Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment
I’m pretty sure Linux doesn’t have a prostate, even with all the changes in the leading edge distros, and you’re commenting in the wrong post.
Scipio_Afri··on Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
Exactly, it sounds like they didn't know who the girl was from photos alone; "Lucy" was just a name they gave the victim.
Scipio_Afri··on State of Show HN: 2025
Great. Do you have any details on how you produced this? The "reproducible code" isn't really reproducible. The "hierarchical topic model" that you mentioned - which model was used?
Scipio_Afri··on Trinity large: An open 400B sparse MoE model
Pretty sure those use to be $1999 ... but not entirely sure
Scipio_Afri··on I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026
I hear you. Title is an exact quote from him. A couple of other accurate direct quotes from him in there. Overall a very neutral take on him.

I'd imagine it's possible bots that have taken root on this site lately - approximately the last year possibly year and a half - seemingly to suppress what could be considered, by sentiment analysis, "negative" news of anything or anyone conservative.

Or those who feel more emboldened to downvote than in previous times on this site; possibly to its growth reaching new demographics. However it feels fairly automated though given how quickly it occurs and the frequency, and how it seemed also to coincide with this last election cycle.

Scipio_Afri··on Anker goes big with new whole home backup system
https://archive.ph/cbQOY
Scipio_Afri··on Interactive Spectrum Chart
Any chance of the source code behind this being open sourced?
Scipio_Afri··on Man who threw sandwich at US border agent not guilty of assault
The guy got arrested, lost his job and had to hire a lawyer. Almost got charged with a felony assault, but the jury decided that he shouldn't be charged. Instead, later charged with a misdemeanor. I'd be super stressed about all of that, plus the trial and then having to wait 7 hours to find out I'm not guilty, but also incredibly happy after. However, all that and his name is forever associated with this incident, so despite no criminal history he might find future employment more challenging. He has probably been through quite a bit despite not being found guilty of a crime. I think that any person who is somehow inspired by doing what he did because he got away with it was always willing to do it anyway. Surely any reasonable person would realize how much he already had to go through which is enough of a deterrent. It was some degree of luck as well, even with similar or same circumstances it might up that another individual is charged and found guilty.

He's fairly lucky he doesn't have a criminal record, but it didn't come without consequences. I think the fact that the sandwich was still wrapped on the ground, hit the officer's shoulder, that the other police at the time were visibly amused during the incident, and clearly joking about it for several days after as well with the officer who had it happen to him, showed that the incident wasn't serious enough to ruin anyone's life over. A formal criminal conviction in the US would've made it hard for him to get employment for some time, if not the rest of his life.

Scipio_Afri··on Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse
Would really be great to move windows or tab groups between different profiles; Edge offers this. Sometimes you don't realize what profile you're in and you start doing stuff in your personal profile that doesn't fit there. With firefox right now there is no way to select and move any tabs, tab groups or windows to the profile that is best suited for those links.
Scipio_Afri··on Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
Which high speed rail projects are you referring to?
Scipio_Afri··on Context engineering
There is inherent non-determinism in all machine learning models unless you explicitly configure pytorch or other frameworks to do determinism (https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/randomness.html). However, this is very unlikely to be done in models that are being run in production due to performance and other issues.
Scipio_Afri··on Context engineering
Hey Simon, do you have any posts diving into how one might be able to deal with evaluating LLMs or Machine Learning models in general when reproducibility is so difficult given non-determinism? Pytorch has an article on it https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/randomness.html but then doesn't really go into how one would then take this deterministic result, and evaluate a model that is in production (which would very likely need for performance reasons the non-determinism features enabled).

While this affects all models it seems, I think the case gets worse for in particular LLMs because I would imagine all backends, including proprietary ones, are batching users prompts. Other concurrent requests seem to change the output of your request, and then if there is even a one token change to the input or output token, especially on large inputs or outputs, the divergence can compound. Also vLLM's documentation mentions this: https://docs.vllm.ai/en/latest/usage/faq.html

So how does one do benchmarking of AI/ML models and LLMs reliably (lets ignore arguing over the flaws of the metrics themselves, and just the fact that the output for any particular input can diverge given the above). You'd also want to redo evals as soon as any hardware or software stack changes are made to the production environment.

Seems like one needs to setup a highly deterministic backend, by forcing non-deterministic behavior in pytorch and using a backend which doesn't do batching for an initial eval that would allow for troubleshooting and non-variation in output to get a better sense of how consistent the model without the noise of batching and non-deterministic GPU calculations/kernels etc.

However then, for production, when determinism isn't guaranteed because you'd need batching and non-determism for performance, I would think that one would want to do multiple runs in various real-world situations (such as multiple users doing all sorts of different queries at the same time) and do some sort of averaging of the results. But I'm not entirely sure, because I would imagine the types of queries other users are making would then change the results fairly significantly. I'm not sure how much the batching that vLLM does would change the results of the output; but vLLM does say that batching does influence changes in the outputs.

Scipio_Afri··on When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun
Nearly everything controversial about them can be simplified to most entirely being before the existence of the Church committee.

The reforms put in place since then has prevented any rouge sort of activity which might not have been in the interests of the US to peruse, be legal, or otherwise explicitly asked for by the president or congress for them do

Scipio_Afri··on What will become of the CIA?
Citation #1 is 404 - unable to find this article anywhere when googling.

Citation #2 is a link a good reads page for "The Lincoln Lawyer" - confused on how this is relevant to "air america"

Citation #3 is not a specific link to any particular article, just the miamiherald's home page.

And someone previously mentioned there is no citation for claim 4

Kind of feels like astroturfing or a bot of some sort. Mind clarifying any of this?

Scipio_Afri··on US Supreme Court limits federal judges' power to block Trump orders
Mind providing a link to more info about your first claim about the ACLU?
Scipio_Afri··on Attack of the Sadistic Zombies – Paul Krugman
This really shouldn't be flagged.
Scipio_Afri··on Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android
What about using this to replace a multi screen setup at home?
Scipio_Afri··on A study of lightning fatalities inside buildings while using smartphones [pdf] (2024)
I guess it's another good reason for why I shouldn't have my phone charging in the bed with me while I sleep; the other good reason being battery fires.
Scipio_Afri··on Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent
Have a link to an article talking about them doing this?
Scipio_Afri··on How I created a real-time F1 circuit tracker that updates every second on iOS
Is this open source at all? Do you have any more detailed write ups on some of the things you learned?
Scipio_Afri··on U.S.-born American citizen under ICE hold in Florida after driving from Georgia
Why is this flagged. Should not be flagged
Scipio_Afri··on U.S.-born man from Georgia held for ICE under Florida's new anti-immigration law
Why is this flagged
Scipio_Afri··on Advanced Shell Scripting with Bash (2006) [pdf]
Is there an https link to this pdf? So rare to see http nowadays.
Page 1 of 7Next →